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VINTAGE 1957: A NIGHT OF DANCE WITH THE DUKE

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On a June night in 1957, Duke Ellington's orchestra pulled into Carrolltown, Pa., a small agricultural community in the Alleghenies about 200 miles west of Philadelphia, to play for a dance. Several hours later, the musicians climbed back into their bus and moved on toward their next one-night stand.

Carrolltown was just one stop on the Ellington band's steady grind of touring. In the heyday of big bands before World War II, those stops sometimes lasted for several weeks. But by the 50's they had become predominantly one-nighters. That night in Carrolltown might easily have become just part of the blur of endless bus stops that was the life of a road band - and, in fact, until a few weeks ago it was. But the Duke, with an eye to the future and to having a record of his own work as composer and band leader, took every opportunity to have the band recorded - on the road or in the studio, regardless of any immediate possibility of releasing the results.

The dance at Carrolltown was one of those routine occasions. But it is now a special occasion because excerpts from the recordings made that night have been released, after more than a quarter of a century, as a two- disk set, ''Duke Ellington: All Star Road Band'' on the Doctor Jazz label. The band was in fine fettle, the recording by Jack Towers has great presence and depth, and the atmosphere crackles with excitement and with the exuberance of warm response between musicians and dancers.

The recording captures the full flavor of an evening with the Ellington band at a dance. A piquant element of that flavor is the personality of the Duke as exhibited in the tongue- in-cheek elegance of his introductions and his use of the piano as glue, background and a stimulus to his musicians. He sets the tone for the evening - light, assured and consistently on the move. He was obviously having a good time, and from the responses and the enthusiasm of the conversational murmur that fills the hall, so was his audience. Their mutual responsiveness is caught at an exuberant peak when, while the band vamps softly behind him, the Duke playfully warns the dancers that the bar is about to close although the band will continue to play for another half- hour.

Musically, the collection is a model of representative Ellingtonia. There are well-established standards of the Ellington repertory that are put in new perspective. ''Perdido,'' for example, which was a rugged, sweeping ensemble piece in the 30's and 40's, has become in 1957 a vehicle for Clark Terry's high, skittery trumpet lines, and Harry Carney has turned ''Sophisticated Lady'' into an exercise in circular breathing on the baritone saxophone. There is an extraordinarily relaxed eight-minute version of ''Mood Indigo'' featuring Russell Procope's low, bubbling clarinet and Willie Cook's easygoing muted trumpet with the Duke's piano floating through the background.

''Such Sweet Thunder,'' composed only a couple of months earlier, is a glowing example of Mr. Ellington's use of his supple brass team. Two of his compositions of the 30's, ''Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue'' and ''Jeep's Blues,'' have taken on new life after their success a year earlier at the Newport Jazz Festival. There are Ellington versions of pop tunes, notably ''Stardust'' with Shorty Baker's gently willowy trumpet. And there are lesser known Ellington works - ''Frustration,'' ''Cop Out,'' ''Bassment'' - along with such specialties for Johnny Hodges's lithe and warm alto saxophone as ''I Got It Bad'' and ''On the Sunny Side of the Street.''

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It is a collection that brings Duke Ellington and his orchestra vividly alive for anyone who ever saw them and it may offer an explanation of his personal and musical charisma for those who missed him. A far more detailed exploration of the Duke's work is being made available in a remarkable series of 48 disks drawn from a weekly series of radio broadcasts that the Ellington band did for the Treasury Department in 1945 and 1946.

The hour-long programs, played when the band still had most of the stars of its peak period in the early 40's (Ben Webster, Cootie Williams and Jimmy Blanton are missing), cover the full spectrum of the Duke's work as a composer during the 20's, 30's and early 40's, from ''Creole Love Call'' and ''Black and Tan Fantasy'' to the extended works he was beginning to compose, ''Black, Brown and Beige'' and ''The Perfume Suite.''

The consistency of Mr. Ellington's writing and of his band's performance is startling when one is faced with such a mass of material as this (somewhere between 200 and 300 different tunes - I got tired of counting). There are multiple performances of many tunes but each program has its fresh surprises and excitement. Program number 11, for example, broadcast from Akron, Ohio (the Duke was on the road, as usual) includes a gorgeous saxophone duet by Otto Hardwick on alto and Harry Carney, baritone, on the then new pop song, ''I Should Care,'' a bristling cornet and trumpet duet by Rex Stewart and Taft Jordan on ''Tootin' Through the Roof'' which starts out with some rollicking stride piano by the Duke, his rarely played 1930's composition, ''Blue Belles of Harlem,'' and a surprisingly swinging attack on ''Body and Soul'' which gains its momentum from the Duke's driving opening solo, and still another duet, this one involving Ray Nance on cornet and Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet.

The programs are complete as originally broadcast, including promotional pitches for war bonds read by Mr. Ellington and some exclamatory introductions by overly enthusiastic announcers. Both these elements give the disks a period authenticity that supplements the Ellington music that, after almost 40 years, sounds incredibly fresh and immediate. The records have been issued three at a time since 1981. Thirty have been released and three more are about to be put out. The entire set of 48 disks can be bought by subscription for $123.75 from Duke Ellington Treasury Series, P.O. Box 156, Hicksville, N.Y. 11802.

A version of this review appears in print on January 8, 1984, on Page 2002021 of the National edition with the headline: VINTAGE 1957: A NIGHT OF DANCE WITH THE DUKE. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe